Entries Tagged 'Review' ↓

I’ve been learning Ruby on Rails. Who hasn’t? Right?

Well, I think it’s safe to say there are some caveats to be aware of for anyone who is considering learning Rails.

First of all, all those beautiful screencasts and demos of building a working web app in minutes are a cool and catchy, but a little bit misleading. The truth is, if you are new to Rails, it isn’t going to be so simple or easy. If you’ve built web apps a few times before (you’re experienced) in PHP, then some things will be easier. But Rails is a lot different. Ruby is a pretty different language also.

You will need to learn Ruby, and, you should learn Ruby before sticking your nose into Rails. Trying to program in Ruby by the conventions you may be used to in other languages is possible, but not in Rails. Rails itself is Ruby, but it is (like any programming framework) boxed in to a a particular approach.

So, you need to learn Ruby, then learn how Rails is different from more usual Ruby code. Rails establishes a truckload of things it will do for you, but you have to learn what they are and you have to do things the way Rails expects them in order to take advantage of its capabilities properly. This is how frameworks go. You must bend to somebody else’s paradigm. The Cocoa framework for programming GUI applications on OS X is an example of this.

There is a lot in Rails. A LOT. It’s been under development for a long time now and has grown and matured pretty well. That said, it is a framework and it means you will need to get used to reading the API and searching the internet and reading books for answers. A big caveat, is that many books already have outdated information, and many web sites as well. Rails is typical of Ruby development, it changes quickly, it’s a moving target sometimes.

If you are new to web app development, don’t expect the Agile Web Development With Rails book to make things clear for you at first. It’s a whirlwind tromp through a lot of technologies all at once. Ruby for Rails is a better book at holding your hand and explaining a lot of things. But before all of that, make sure you’ve read a book like Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional and you have the ‘pickaxe’ book, Programming Ruby, 2nd edition, as a reference book.

The Ruby Cookbook and the Rails Cookbook are also useful additions as are most of the Rails books out there. Every single one of them will show you different approaches to doing similar things. Rails Solutions: Ruby on Rails Made Easy, is another book that is very recent and has excellent info on setting your system up and getting things working well before you even start coding.

Google Analytics was previously semi-useful as a web site traffic analysis tool. The previous incarnation was often confusing and had many non-intuitive mystery features coupled with terrible organization and absurdly missing features (delete an “account”? how?).

From a user standpoint it’s just gotten worse with the added AJAX. More pretty line graphs and distracting tool-tip style mouseOver events, less explanation of what the hell I’m seeing! To make matters worse, the stuff has been re-organized, or I should say, further disorganized in a truly Microsoft manner.

I guess Google really is actually in competition with Microsoft. Google makes a great search engine, but they make lousy interfaces. They made themselves famous with the orginal Google search engine page’s simplicity. But everything else they produce just seems to out-do Yahoo! and go head-to-head with Microsoft for making hard to use web sites. Only Adobe makes more difficult to use web sites, but they make them very pretty.

Apple. Oh, Apple… where for art thou?

When will AJAX just die? Only a few years ago JavaScript had gone away quietly to the graveyard of annoying technologies. Flash is/was on its way there. Now there is a renewed irrational exuberrance for all things overly animated.

Oh, and Google, my dear, the Beta forever thing is getting old. Keep it up and desperate SONY might sue for trademark infringement just to make some cash.

Looks like Google has quietly updated Analytics with more AJAX, resembles stuff from the Yahoo toolkit, but I don’t know or care which toolkit they’re using. It’s just kind of a shame they’re adding all that but there is still no way to remove an “Account” from the Account. The redundancy of having accounts named after the first site entered as an account all under the umbrella of the GMAIL login is pretty ass backwards anyway. It’s even more of a shame that the interface has become less intuitive and is very beta…

Somtimes the democratizing effect of the web is an obnoxious thing. There is a lot of crap out there. No better example exists than podcasting! Precisely, content-publishing in general, podcasting in particular, is an easy-to-do thing and a hard-to-do-well thing. Continue reading →

There’s a new (?) hosting service around that focuses on Rails hosting and does it by the slice. Continue reading →

If you are wondering about Rails and Ruby, stop wondering and dive in. While you’re at it, get a good editor and machine to work with. This means a Mac and TextMate. If you don’t have a Mac already, get one, it’s not the cheapest, but not the most expensive; just the most value for your moollah! Continue reading →

If you’re new to Ruby or Rails, or an old-hat, you gotta have these:
Ruby Cookbook and Rails Cookbook, both Continue reading →

I just tried out Kubuntu 6.10 “edgy eft” on a live dvd I downloaded and burned.
Very Cool, Very Nice. Desktop Linux has truly arrived. Continue reading →

O’Reilly books treat their customers pretty well most of the time. This is maybe because their leader is still alive and actively interested in the tech industry. What’s cooler is, although lots of companies let you register a book online and it is mainly a source of datamining, O’Reilly will actually cut you a 30% discount on an upgrade to a new edition when it comes available. Too bad they don’t make old editions available online though…

That said, O’Reilly usually publishes decent books, but their quality is starting to lag these days, and unfortunately, few of their books ever come close to the quality of the Perl books and the various Unix/Linux/OS X and shell books. Some things are just plain WAY outdated, like the Ruby in a Nutshell book? That’s a langage that’s changed a lot in the last few iterations let alone the horde of them released since the book was published. (update please..)

Nothing is worse than buying a tech book only to find out it is out of date. (this is why I generally won’t buy one more than 1 year old)

Really, 2 things killed Palm. Continue reading →